The Etiquette of Being Left Behind
by jewelwhisperer
Summary: George is not sure if he's doing it right. How are you supposed to act when half of you is suddenly and irreversibly gone? A story about those who pick up the pieces from the view of the shattered.


Disclaimer: I own nothing.

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He spent six days locked in their room, staring at the wall.

Six was a good number, he told himself. The perfect number. One plus two plus three. One times two times three. Six.

It didn't make sense to him, but it was a good number, and he did not feel it could be an arbitrary amount of time. It was not the moment for frivolity. He had to be serious.

He wondered sometimes if their room was really the most appropriate place. He wondered if it was too close to the memories, too close to the loss. Maybe he should have locked himself up in the attic, or perhaps if he sat unmoving in the kitchen for six days it would be better. For all the world to see, so they would believe his grief.

But he was more comfortable in their room, and it did not feel empty the way he imagined it would. There were no sheets on either of the beds, no clothes in the closet. They had not lived here for nearly a year. There was no scent of human bodies left in the carpets or the wallpaper.

Just the distinct feeling of being lost, as though he had taken a wrong turn on the way home and somehow ended up in his old room at the Burrow.

He supposed this was the grief setting in. Eventually he supposed that he would be overcome with it, and then he would cry, and become bitterly depressed. He wondered if he would be the kind of depressed person who was always depressed or the kind where it came and went, fleetingly and unexpected. He wondered if it would destroy his life, or if he would be normal during the day only to be wracked by nightmares when darkness fell. He wondered how it would happen, if it would be during his six-day vigil, or perhaps on the first trip to the grave. He wondered if his mother would hold him tightly or if he would curl up in the fetal position and not move for another six days.

He waited for six days.

On the morning of the seventh, he unfurled himself from the bed, stretched, and emerged into the hallway. He could feel the flutter of activity beneath his feet, in the kitchen. Voices could be heard from the steps. He stopped for a moment, listening to them. Hermione was here. He wondered how Ron felt, how it must be to be torn between loss and gain. At least for him it was easy. For him it was only loss.

He stepped into the kitchen and the activity stopped. Everyone turned to him with hushed faces, and Charlie handed him the cup of tea he had been about to drink. He looked at it, and he supposed he should refuse it, and so set it down.

"We were so worried about you," Ginny finally said, her voice cracking the air. Everyone winced, as though she had dropped a china doll, and waited to see if it were broken.

He thought this was an odd thing to say. Why would they worry about him? They had known where he had been. It's wasn't like their old bedroom was a dangerous place or anything like that.

He thought about telling them all that he was fine, but he wasn't sure if they would take that as a flippant dismissal of his grief or as a denial of the facts. He decided instead not to say anything.

They were all still looking at him. He moved slowly, so as not to break their concentration.

Ginny, encouraged by his lack of tears or any emotion at all, went on to say, "We couldn't wait, George. We had to bury him without you."

He searched for his voice and found it right where it had always been. "Lupin?" He asked, trying to sound tired and worn and finding it easier than usual. "Tonks?"

"Buried. Before…before him." He didn't really think it was fair that everyone was making Ginny do all the talking. It looked painful to her. They should spread around the responsibility, just to be fair.

Charlie, the one standing closest to him, put a hand on his shoulder. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. "Is there anything…" he finally said, trailing off as though those three words were too much.

He shook his head, and Ron's face dropped back down to his plate. There was still a lot of food on it, but none of it looked warm anymore. He wondered how long they had all been sitting there.

He wondered if this was the way Harry felt when Sirius died, because everything came around to Harry eventually, and decided it couldn't be. He guessed this was largely because Harry was so definitive about the way he felt when Sirius died. Harry knew he was hurt and he knew he was depressed and he knew he was angry and he knew what he was going to do about it—he was going to exact revenge. He envied Harry these feelings, because he had not yet reached his bitterly depressed stage and so he was not sure of what he felt, only that he felt it.

He passed all the faces, eyes on him, and out into the garden. The sun was hiding behind a ribbon of clouds, making it hard to see but still bright. The weather should make up its mind, he thought, on whether it wanted to be sunny or dull. He sat on the grass and looked at the dirt, imagining the bodies being covered with it, knowing they had caskets and ceremonies and only able to envision mass graves.

A shiver passed through him, and he reached up absent-mindedly to rub the place where his ear had once been. It was a ridiculous injury, in his opinion. If he was going to be the injured, and if people were going to walk past him as though on glass, then shouldn't he have lost something important? A hand would have been worthwhile, or a leg. He wondered if he could stand without a leg and then he wondered if he could stand without Fred.

And he had arrived, finally, at the subject at hand. Or at leg. Fred would not have thought that funny, he immediately berated himself. There must be a whole world of twin-related humor open to him now, but he couldn't bring himself to put a solid pun together and he wondered if he had lost his sense of humor, too.

Percy was there, then, sitting down hard next to him. For a long moment there was nothing for either of them to say. George didn't know if there would ever be anything for them to say, and then Percy made a noise that could have been, "Hullo." George stared at him, trying to figure out whether or not he had actually spoken, when Percy turned back and said it again, only louder. "Hullo."

"Hullo," he replied. Percy did not look at him. George continued to stare at the freckle below his brother's ear.

After a very long moment, Percy took his glasses off and folded them in his hands, unfolding them, and folding them again, as if he couldn't decide whether to put them back on, or maybe as if he just wanted something to do with his hands. "It wasn't supposed to be like this," he said finally.

George raised an eyebrow.

"I came back to be a family again." His voice sounded far away. "It wasn't supposed to be like this." He put his head in his hands.

"No," George agreed. "It wasn't." He had lost an ear for the war. That was supposed to be it. That was all they were meant to pay. "Do you think that if I had lost both ears, he would've lived?"

Percy looked over at him. George knew this was a crazy thing to say, that there was no logic in it, but there was no worry or confusion in Percy's eyes. "No," Percy answered quite seriously. "No, I imagine that he had his own price to pay. Everything works out all right in the end, you know? Everything happens for a reason and all that."

Everything happens for a reason. How many times had their father told them this, growing up? How many tears from some argument had been wiped away with these words? How many defeats, how many losses, how many deaths had been tempered with these words? That Percy should repeat it now seemed less of a comfort than an offense.

"Look," Percy said, suddenly tense and anxious and almost sounding exasperated, "I came out here to say I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," he answered automatically. "At least you made him laugh."

It was lucky for the both of them that Percy had learned very quickly when to shut up, because George felt a vague feeling that if he had protested, he would have punched him. Not out of anger, or fury, or any kind of revenge, but because this was his pain, his burden. He did not want to share.

There was another moment of silence before Percy heaved himself to his feet, leaving George alone. He was grateful; he did not want the company of someone who didn't know what he was thinking, who didn't move around him like an extension of himself, who lived only in reality and not also in the back of his mind.

He spent the rest of the afternoon in the yard, learning what it felt like to move in just this one body, to think with just this one mind. He wondered about living in the flat by himself, running the store by himself. Celebrating their birthday. The letters on their Christmas sweaters.

At sunset Ginny brought him a plate of sandwiches. He asked quietly if she would eat with him, and she did. And she helped him off the ground, held his elbow on the way into the house, put sheets on his bed. He slept.

Awoke.

Slept.

Awoke.

The Burrow felt full all the time. Aside from the family, there were the friends who were practically family, people who were barely friends, Order members. Mum was always touching, a hand on someone's shoulder or a pat on the back, hugs that squeezed too hard and lasted too long. He wasn't sure why, but George sought her out, wanting her to fix his hair and fuss over how he was losing weight.

But when Mum had too many people to worry about, there was Ginny. There was Ron. Charlie. Harry. They hung out in a group, sometimes sitting with him, sometimes only a room away, constantly there. Ginny made sure he got a plate of food when he did not come to meals, which was always. Harry always asking questions, about the store and about the goings on in the world outside Hogwarts and the Ministry, finally reveling in being normal. The way the two looked at each other. The way Ron and Hermione looked at each other. It reminded him of the way Fred looked at him, a kind of neediness on a cellular level. The two looks, so vastly different, so very much the same. He thought about asking Ron to live without Hermione for the rest of forever and finally cried when he imagined the look on his face.

The tears were thick and desperate and on the most basic level he thought _this is it. This can be my break from this reality. This can be my depression._

It came. So did the people that had been hovering around him, living their lives with careful considering of him.

Ginny sat next to him, Charlie on the other side, and they held on _so tight_, arms wrapped around him as he wrapped around himself, as though they were trying to hold his soul together. Ron, looking up at him from the floor, holding hands with Hermione, who in turn was leaning on Harry. Bill came and went and came again, Mum in tow. Dad came home from work, holding Percy together with a hand on his chest.

They stood vigil as he sobbed and screamed, breathing so ragged he sounded inhuman, his eyes burning. They all cried silent tears. They were all drowning in their tears. They were drowning not only in their own pain but also his, which washed over them and almost comforted them in its intensity.

And the voice, whispering, "It is going to be okay. Everything happens for a reason. In the end, it will be okay. Everything happens for a reason." It was Fred. It was Dad. It was each and every one of them, all touching on an emotional level, all sharing the cells that burned with pain and loss.

All connected.

All together.


End file.
